


The Seventh Day

by HolmesianDeduction



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Aromantic Anathema, Don't copy to another site, Gen, Post-Canon, Soul-Searching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-30 18:51:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19409260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HolmesianDeduction/pseuds/HolmesianDeduction
Summary: On the seventh day after the world fails to end, Anathema Device asks herself, "Now what?"Based on a prompt on Tumblr.





	The Seventh Day

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Maawi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maawi/gifts).



On the seventh day after the world ends – well, almost ends anyway – Anathema Device, witch, and up until recently, professional descendent, disappears. She doesn’t tell anyone where she’s going, in part because she doesn’t know herself, really. So she just disappears with nothing more than a short note.

_Gone searching. Be back soon._

It wasn’t burning Agnes’s manuscript that did it, though that certainly had a hand in it, but the events of the day before, when for the first time – at least that Anathema could remember – Agnes had been wrong.

The lawyer had brought the parcel for _Mr. and Mrs. Pulsifer_. They hadn’t been married – hadn’t even planned on getting married. Not for a long while anyway, if at all. _And_ , the glance the two of them had shared over the chest added, _there were certainly no plans for Anathema to take anyone’s last name._

She hadn’t said anything then, but the mistake had been sitting at the back of her mind ever since.

When they – no, _she_ ; Newt had been there, yes, but just as moral support – had burned the prophecies, something had clicked in her head.

“Do you want to go on being a descendant,” Newt had asked, trying to be encouraging, “or just be yourself?”

She had fed another page to the tiny, probably-against-some-village-bylaw fire, but didn’t respond. Instead she was forcing herself not to count the number of prophecies that she had already burned, or how many she had left to go. A part of her had considered keeping them, another had considered finding Aziraphale and offering them to him, but she didn’t know where to find him, or even if doing so wouldn’t threaten to pull them all back into another apocalypse.

So she burned it all, went back to the cottage, and on the seventh day, she packed a bag and disappeared.

There was a part of herself that wondered what Newt would do – she cared for him more than she had expected, and he was sweet, in an uncertain kind of way, but this wasn’t about him, and if, in the end, he was gone when she returned, then that would be that. For the first time in her life, there was nothing at all to point her in the right direction or tell her what decisions to make. It was, she thought, kind of like being in grad school all over again.

(Granted, Agnes had known she would go to grad school, and to her horror, had also predicted that she would go for a completely different subject than what was stated in the first prophecy that mentioned it – her mother had managed to hide that one from her somehow until after graduation)

For the first day, she drove – not entirely legally, mind you – for hours at a time without stopping. There was a time when she would have stopped at Stonehenge, just for the hell of it, but it just didn’t seem worth it at this point, even if it was just to see if there even still _was_ a Stonehenge. It was only a six and a half hour drive up to Glasgow, even in the banged up rental she had managed to talk her way into taking, and she stayed for what felt for an age, but was only three days, before moving on, taking the clunker as far north as she thought she could push it before falling back on the old reliability of her bicycle.

It’s on the fifth day after the seventh day after the world fails to end, in a sea cave over a bag of pretzels that Anathema takes the time to try and list out all the things that she knows herself to be.

 _Last known direct descendent of Agnes Nutter, prophetess_.

She sighed, crossed it out, and began again.

 _~~Last known direct descendent of Agnes Nutter, prophetess~~_ ~~.~~

_Anathema Device._

_Woman._

_Witch._

She wrinkled her nose, crossed it out.

 _~~Witch.~~ _ _Occultist._

_PhD._

_Partial Saviour of the World._

She laughed at this one, but didn’t quite go through with crossing it out, instead glancing back up at the first item on the list, stricken out with a crisp pen-stroke, lingering on it for longer than she’d liked before finally, at the bottom of the list, writing in tight, careful letters:

_Last known direct descendent of Agnes Nutter, prophetess._

“Now what?”

In the relative silence of the cave, her voice sounded louder than she had intended, but all she received in response was the distant crashing of surf on rock and the cries of seabirds. She had dated a girl in college – and through half of grad school for that matter – who probably would have told her to listen to her heart for once, and she almost wished she could tell her that the response coming from there wasn’t much more help than the birds.

She could go back to the States, to California, and report back – tell her mother about the way things had played out. On some level, she felt that was what she _should_ do – it was her duty, but for the first time in her life, she just didn’t _care_.

This was not entirely true – a fact that she conceded a moment later.

She _did_ care. About her duty to her family, about her mother, about what on some level was her mother’s right to know, finally, what it was she and her grandmother and her great-grandmother, and all the Device women through hundreds of years had been preparing for.

She just wanted to know what it meant for her first. To already have the answers to those questions before they were asked of her. To know what she was supposed to do, what she was supposed to feel, rather than what was expected of her.

On the other hand, there was Jasmine Cottage, and the odd little village that she had gotten used to over the short time that she’d lived there. There was Adam, Pepper, Wensleydale, and Brian, who while she had never wanted children – still didn’t – were lovely and had become something of a fixture. Hell, even Dog had grown on her, and she didn’t even like dogs, really.

And then there was also Newt. Who was lovely, and oddly candid about what he did or didn’t understand, and as she had known he might be, was very susceptible to falling in love. She liked him very much. Might love him even – it was too soon to tell, really; she seldom loved anything from the start – but she wasn’t in love with him, and if her track record held true, she never would be in love with him, or with anyone.

When she was growing up, she got used to hearing girls in school, cousins, distant relatives, talking about crushes, and love, and marriage, but the concepts seemed as abstract to her as life or death (though substantially more abstract than taxes). She had never mentioned it to her mother, or to anyone, really. Instead she had just let her relationships, which were few and far between, run their course, and tried not to focus on it too hard, which was easy enough – she had more than enough to keep her occupied.

_Key word here being ‘had.’_

That night, in the tiny room she had taken out in the back of an old lady’s cottage, she made up her mind, and early the next morning, she made the trek back to where her rental was stowed.

The eight hour drive seemed somehow longer coming back down than it had going up, and it had been dark for hours before her bicycle made its way to its place along the side of the cottage, where she was only half-surprised to see Dick Turpin still loitering just on the edge of the house lights, his driver’s side door repaired far more effectively than she expected. The front door was locked, and it took her a moment to fish her key out of her pockets, but it slid in easily, and the click of the lock was almost inaudible, even in the relative quiet of the evening. Taking one last deep breath, Anathema turned the knob and went inside.

Newt was sitting at the kitchen table, gingerly tapping on a small, wireless keyboard attached to an elderly tablet, a rapidly cooling mug sitting a respectful distance from the electronic device. She watched him for a moment, then set her case on a chair.

“Hi.”

Starting, he jerked his head up, a small spark jumping from his fingertip to the keyboard, and the tablet went dark. “Shit!” Newt squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, but then was on his feet and around the table, speaking entirely too fast, as he sometimes did when nervous. “Sorry, it’s fine. I’ll just have to charge it up again, probably. For some reason, I don’t seem to crash it right away, but if I get a fright, something happens and the battery drains.” Finally, he paused to take a breath. “Sorry. How- how are you? You alright?”

Anathema nodded, then let herself fall into one of the kitchen chairs, closing her eyes as Newt moved past her, instinctively putting the kettle back on. As she reacquainted herself with the gentle thrum of the cottage, it occurred to her in the back of her mind that nearly every kettle she’d seen Newt handle heated incredibly quickly, coming to the right temperature far sooner than they should. She filed that thought away for later and focused on organising her thoughts back into the order she needed them in for this conversation until she felt the familiar warmth of her mug pressed into her hand.

“You look tired.” Newt’s voice was quiet – he had a habit of quietly stating the obvious as a form of support. “How far did you drive?”

“Bit past Glasgow.”

There was a long pause. “That’s got to be…what? Four hours at least? You drove straight through?”

“Six and some change, and yes.” Anathema inhaled the steam from the tea and opened her eyes. “It’s not that long a drive, really.”

“It was six hours!”

“I’ve driven further.” She could see Newt beginning to do the math in his head, and added, “North America is huge, remember?”

Newt raised his eyebrows in an expression that said _Oh yes, that is true, isn’t it_ , but didn’t say anything for a long time. Finally, when he spoke up, it was with a question that she hadn’t been expecting.

“What made you come back?”

Anathema blinked. “I…”

Newt blanched. “I mean apart from all your things being here, I’m sorry. Didn’t even think of that. Stupid really.” He took a long sip from his own mug, which at some point had become warm again. “Can I ask you something?”

She raised an eyebrow over her tea, but nodded for him to continue.

“Did you…was the only reason that we…you know–”

“Fucked?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it again and nodded. “Yeah. That.”

“Was it only because Agnes said it would happen?”

If it hadn’t been for how stupidly earnest he was, she might have laughed. Instead she managed to shake her head. “I mean, there was also the whole ‘the world might be ending in the next hour and we very much might die’ portion of it.”

“Fair.”

“But no,” she continued, “I still have free will, and I could very much have decided not to do so.”

“Look.” She could see Newt’s resolve falter, then strengthen again in his face, and she leaned back in her chair. “I know you said…what you said back there. At the air base, but…you don’t know me, and I don’t know you. So if you want to just forget it all happened, we can do that, and I’ll head back to London, and you can head back to America, and if you want to keep in touch, we can, but you shouldn’t feel obligated.”

He rattled off the last part so quickly, that it took a moment to process it all, and when Anathema replied, she began by simply stating. “I remember everything. It’s hard to forget the apocalypse.”

“I didn’t me–” Newt protested and she held up a hand.

“I know what you meant, and I agree. We should get to know one another better; understand each other first.” She gave him a crooked smile. “Get dinner, maybe.” Newt ducked his head and she laughed. “First though, I’m going to sleep for days.”

She stood up, and Newt took her empty mug, pausing halfway to the sink. “Should I – should I take the sofa? I can do that if you prefer. Or there might be an air mattress in a storage closet – sometimes rentals have them.”

Grabbing her bag, she shook her head and raised her voice above the running water. “Don’t worry about that – I don’t mind the company. Come up when you’re ready.”

As she finally fell into bed, she glanced at the clock on the wall in time to see it strike midnight.

And on the seventh day after the seventh day, Anathema Device rested.


End file.
